World Risk Poll 2024 report: Resilience in a changing world

The World Risk Poll is the first and only global, nationally representative study of worry about, and harm from, risks to people’s safety. The Poll is based on nearly 147,000 interviews conducted by Gallup in 142 countries and territories throughout 2023 and covers places where little to no official data on safety and risks exist. It measures 120 of the same countries surveyed in the previous Poll in 2021. The 2023 World Risk Poll provides the second edition of the World Risk Poll Resilience Index – a unique measure of how prepared people and communities worldwide are to handle adversity such as disasters based on their circumstances and perceptions of support systems.

The key findings of this report include:

• While overall resilience was stable at a global level from 2021 to 2023, resilience at the individual level fell, with significant drops in almost a third (42) of countries measured in the Index in both years. This decline was driven by a global increase, from 36% to 43%, in the number of people who say they can do nothing to protect themselves and their families in a disaster, suggesting a global loss of agency;
• The proportion of the global population that has experienced a disaster related to a natural hazard in the past five years has increased by 3 percentage points from 2021 to 2023, from 27% to 30%, primarily driven by increased experience of flooding;
• 30% of people globally who experienced a disaster in the past five years received no warning, with rural, less educated and less financially resilient populations significantly less likely to be warned. However, over three-quarters (77%) of those not warned own a mobile phone, presenting an important opportunity for investment in mobile/cell-broadcast early warning systems.